In praise of the Old I.O. [An article from: International Journal of Industrial Organization]

This digital document is a journal article from International Journal of Industrial Organization, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
''Old I.O.'' is the body of empirical regularities obtained by cross-section statistical methods following their introduction by Bain [Bain, 1951. Relation of profit rate to industry concentration: American manufacturing, 1936-1940. Quarterly Journal of Economics 65, 293-324.]. Its researchers did not seek to fit particular theoretical (oligopoly) models to market data, apart from theoretical conditions for sustainable collusion, but they did establish a large number of empirical regularities - cross-section associations between dimensions of performance (allocative efficiency, productive efficiency, turnover of suppliers) in markets and their structural and behavioral features. These associations continue to serve a wide range of uses for economic understanding and policy formation.